Once Every Never

  “The spirit warrior ritual was never completed,” Llassar continued, speaking directly to Connal. “Your spirit was readied for travel, but it was not released. It is within you still, but it is unbound. Unfettered. It can go forth now … and then return again. And, once in her world, your spirit can guide Clarinet along another way—along the spiral path that is the unseen road leading into the heart of the queen’s barrow.”

  Clare knew she was staring at Llassar wide-eyed. But, really? Was it so much of a stretch for a Toronto girl who’d been bouncing back and forth in time for the last few days? She turned to look at Connal. There was a wildness still in his eyes, but he’d taken on a look of rigid determination. He nodded once, curtly. Clare got the uneasy feeling that he was agreeing to what Llassar had proposed only because he had nothing to lose.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Clare said.

  He shook his head. “Llassar is right. It is Andrasta’s will. I will go with you when you return to your world and I will be your guide.” He slipped the silver cuff off his wrist and held it out to Llassar. Clare remembered how the talisman had sparked and triggered her own magic when she’d touched it. “Make the magic, Llassar.”

  “I can,” the Druid smith said. “But I’ll need help.”

  “What kind of help?” Clare asked.

  Llassar’s gaze met hers and, beneath his beard, his mouth quirked upward in a humourless grin. “How good a friend is this … Milo?”

  22

  “Oh, sure. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for disaster at all,” Al said. And then added, in net-speak, “End sarcasm.” Just in case Clare hadn’t picked up on it.

  Llassar had told Clare what needed to happen if his magic was to work in her world. Clare had conveyed the plan, with all its details and dangers, to Al and Milo. Milo fell silent, mulling the idea, while Al frothed over with proclamations of impending doom.

  When Connal had placed his silver wrist cuff in Boudicca’s tomb, Clare had assumed it was simply a gesture. Of course, that was before Llassar had enlightened her; otherwise, she never would have guessed that Connal’s disembodied spirit was actually tethered to his accessories—one of which was now sitting on Milo’s coffee table. It looked innocent enough, but Clare had watched Llassar perform the ritual. She had felt the night air crackle with the power the Druid smith called down and had watched as the cuff began to glow with eerie, eldritch light in the moments before Connal slumped to the ground, senseless. And Clare knew that the bracelet she’d carried back with her through time was brimming with Connal’s disembodied spirit—just waiting to be released so that it could play tour guide at Bartlow Hills.

  But there was only one way for it to do that.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Clare sighed. She shared Al’s concerns.

  “No.” Al sat glaring suspiciously at the harmless-looking piece of jewellery. “But I’m so not keen on risking the health and well-being of the only guy in London who will drive us places this summer.”

  Milo snorted. “Thanks, Allie.”

  Al waved a dismissive hand at him. “Plus he’s my cousin and I love him yada yada. This is a bad idea. There cannot possibly be any worse ideas than this one.”

  “Fine,” Clare snapped. “Okay. I know what we’re gonna do instead.”

  “What?”

  Clare stood up and pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves that Milo had lent her so that she could handle the silver artifact—and any other shimmer triggers—without risk of coming into contact and setting off a time trip. She put the cuff back in her jacket pocket where Llassar had placed it and turned to Al. “We’re going to take Boudicca’s torc back to the museum, give it to my aunt, and tell her the whole weird-ass story, top to bottom. And then she’s going to tell us what the hell to do.”

  “Okay,” Al said. “I give up. You win. That is a much, much worse idea.”

  AL AND MILO had both honestly thought she’d been joking when Clare had made the suggestion back in Milo’s apartment. Maggie had thought she’d been joking when she’d started to tell her about the last few days.

  None of them thought she was joking now.

  But the fact that Maggie thought Clare was being serious didn’t exactly mean she was having an easy time wrapping her cerebral faculties around her niece’s story. She had tried breaking it down into its component minutiae and focusing on the details one at a time, but that held its own share of problems.

  “Wait just one minute, young lady!” Maggie had squawked abruptly at one point in the telling. She shot out of her desk chair and stalked across the room, closing the door to her office and throwing the bolt lock for good measure. “Clare—do you mean to say you’ve actually met Claxton Man?”

  “Yes.”

  “More like ‘Claxton Hottie,’” Al murmured.

  Clare kicked her under the table. Over in the corner, standing beside a shelf groaning with books and what looked like a real human skull, Milo frowned faintly.

  “The Claxton Man?” Maggie asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “The Bog Man Claxton Man?”

  “His real name is Connal—”

  “Oh dear …” Maggie got a bit on the breathy side. “What was he like?”

  “Really cute, apparently,” Al chimed in.

  Clare squeezed her eyes shut. Al seemed to be exacting some kind of penance for Clare’s having made time with a dead Druid while Milo got his lights punched out on her behalf. On the one hand, Clare could actually appreciate Al’s loyalty to her cousin. On the other, she really wished Al would just shut up.

  “Dark smouldering gaze, nice chest, square jaw …” Al was on a roll. “Soft lips. Occasionally painted blue—”

  “Soft …” Maggie’s eyes went window-wide with shock. “Clarinet Imogen Reid! Were you snogging a Bog Man?”

  Milo’s blue eyes glittered with grim amusement.

  “Uh—yeah.” Clare glared at Milo defiantly for a moment. She wasn’t about to apologize to him. He’d had five whole years to declare his affections, after all. She turned her attention back to her aunt. “Yes. A bit. And it wasn’t my idea. Also, he was pre-bog. But, y’know, thanks for the mental picture …”

  “I haven’t even met this boy,” Maggie protested weakly, wandering back behind her desk where she wilted down into her chair. Maggie had somehow seized on this one issue and defaulted into parental-substitute mode. “You’re not to have boyfriends unless I’ve at least met them …”

  “He is not my boyfriend. He is so not!” Clare protested hotly. “Look—you can ground me later if you really feel the need, okay—”

  “I may just do that.”

  “—but right now there are slightly more important things to worry about than which archaeological curiosity I’ve been sucking face with!” Clare glanced over at Milo. “That goes for you, too!”

  Clare’s outburst seemed to snap Maggie back to reality somewhat. She raked a hand through her hair, throwing one side of her neatly swept updo into disarray. “I just don’t know what you expect me to make of all this, Clare. The whole story is … well, it’s …”

  “Mags,” Clare said quietly, “Please. I know you used to hang around with Stuart Morholt. He had no trouble believing any of it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, deep down, you don’t either.”

  Maggie regarded Clare sharply for a long silent moment, an obvious struggle going on behind her eyes.

  “Do you?” Clare asked.

  “I …” Maggie sighed and slumped forward, leaning on her desk. “… No. You’re right, Clare. I’ve … seen things. Done things. A long time ago.”

  “You were one of the Order of the Free Peoples of Prydein, weren’t you, Dr. Wallace?” Milo asked.

  Clare and Al turned to stare at him. And then back at Maggie.

  “I was very young. Inexcusably stupid. Also a bit smitten …” Maggie smiled bitterly. “We were all antiquities students at Cambridge, and—just purely for fun, you understand—a bunch of us f
ormed a little secret club. In the beginning it was just a silly excuse to dress up and have parties in fields. But for a core group of us, it became something more. One time, in second year, we decided to take a road trip to Glastonbury Tor.”

  “That big hill in the Midlands where they have the hippie music festival every year?” Clare’s parents had actually gone to it once, back in the throes of their bizarre musical youth, and she’d seen pictures of them standing knee-deep in mud and paisley polyester at the base of the hill.

  “Yes.” Maggie nodded. “There’s always been a theory—not exactly a scientific one, mind you—that says if you walk the path the right way, you open up a mystical portal to another world.”

  “I did some recent aerial survey conversions of that area,” Milo said. “In overhead photographs you can see ridges in the hillside that wind around in a kind of switchback pattern. Like a maze.”

  “Exactly like a maze.” Maggie nodded. “Some people think King Arthur’s buried there. Others think it’s a gateway to Hell. Or the Underworld.” She looked at Clare. “Or the past.”

  Clare shivered.

  “At any rate, there was one young man who was part of our group, and he worshipped Stuart, who treated him as a lackey, of course.” Maggie’s gaze went unfocused as she began to remember. “There was … an incident. Stuart performed a ritual he’d discovered in some arcane text with one of the artifacts we’d found on a student dig. The young man—he was just a boy, really, a Romance Languages major—he just … disappeared. Vanished into thin air right in front of our eyes. We never saw him again.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  Maggie shook her head. “I’m thoroughly ashamed to say we didn’t. I didn’t. Stuart convinced us straightaway that we’d be laughed out of the university. Or worse—charged with some sort of crime. So we all agreed to never speak of it again. The poor lad’s disappearance was chalked up to a runaway due to academic stress.” She sighed, and it was the saddest sound Clare had ever heard her aunt make. “But every year on that date I drive out to Glastonbury. And I can hear him. Feel him there. He’s not gone. He’s just …”

  “Elsewhere,” Clare said. “Elsewhen. I know. I’ve been there.” “Yes.” Maggie’s gaze snapped back to her niece. “And you have a lot to answer for young lady, after all this is said and done! What have I always told you about antiquities? NO TOUCHING.”

  Clare refrained from pointing out that touching antiquities was what Maggie did all the time and, in fact, she’d developed a nicely lucrative little career for herself in the process. “So what do we do, Mags? Do we give the torc back to the museum? Hand it over to Dr. Jenkins? Tell her to increase security by about a billion percent?”

  Maggie took her glasses off her head and tossed them on the desk, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I haven’t seen Ceciley all day. And frankly, I’m rather disappointed in her. She vehemently denied that Stuart Morholt is even alive—let alone responsible for the theft—even after I showed her the note he left behind. But she knows as well as I do what he’s capable of.”

  “What is he capable of?”

  “Exploding things, mostly. After the incident at Glastonbury he went a bit off the rails. I mean, mentally. We parted ways—rather acrimoniously—and I haven’t had any direct contact with him since. Not until the torc was stolen and he saw fit to send me a mocking little note letting me know he was the one who’d stolen it.”

  “Why’d you guys break up?”

  “Because after Glastonbury I decided to leave the whole of that nonsense behind me and concentrate on real history and real science. No more mystic mumbo jumbo for me. As for Stuart, in the early eighties he became notorious—wanted by Scotland Yard for several instances of what, in today’s par-lance, would be known as ‘domestic terrorism.’ He was responsible for blowing up the offices of developers and politicians who were razing sites he deemed of historical significance. Even if they were of no real worth whatsoever to the scholarly community. He once broke into a construction site near Tewkesbury and torched an entire fleet of bulldozers because a road-widening project was going to require the removal of an ancient yew tree that Stuart had decided was once sacred to the Druiddyn.”

  “Really. How would he know?”

  “Oh, it’s all arbitrary nonsense. He claimed he was being spoken to from the beyond, haunted by the spirit voice of an ancient Druid. One who demanded the restoration of the greatness of the Celtic Tribes—a true return to the glory of the Island of the Mighty. Honestly. He’s completely mad. And when the authorities came close to catching him one too many times, he faked his own death. I knew it wasn’t true. I think Ceciley did, too. She’s just been in denial all this time. Poor deluded thing.”

  “What’s her connection to him?”

  “She was also a member of the Free Peoples back in the day. I always suspected that she only did it because she was rather nutty over Morholt.”

  “But Stu had his eye on someone else,” Al said. Good lord, thought Clare. Maggie’s blushing.

  “I don’t think it’s safe to return the torc to the public eye at the moment,” Maggie continued, brushing aside the comment. “Dr. Jenkins doesn’t take Stuart Morholt seriously, and I don’t think she’ll believe your story about Boudicca’s curse. To this day she denies she was even with us at Glastonbury Tor. No. I think we have to risk returning the torc to its rightful owner.”

  Clare blinked. Honestly, it was the last thing she’d expected Maggie to propose. “You mean …?”

  “I think we must go to Bartlow and walk your Druid’s spiral path.”

  Al was staring openly at her. “I thought you said it was all mystic mumbo jumbo.”

  “I did,” Maggie replied grimly. “But I didn’t say it wasn’t real.”

  “MILO?” He’d been silent for almost a full two minutes. Clare could hardly blame him, now that she’d told him exactly what she needed him to do.

  She shifted Comorra’s brooch from one leather-gloved palm to the other, reassuring herself that she had it with her so that she could leave it with the princess in her tomb. It seemed only right, somehow. Still, Clare was having massive second thoughts about the whole scheme. It was one thing to send herself hurtling through time and space, but another thing entirely to enlist Milo to play host to the disembodied spirit of an ancient mystical warrior prince. It really was asking too much.

  “Milo?” she said again. “You seriously don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “Right,” he said finally, raising his head and smiling faintly at her. “I remember you saying you didn’t want me to be a hero.”

  Damn. I never should have opened my big mouth. “That’s so not what I meant and you know it,” she said, frowning up at him. “I just meant you don’t have anything to prove to me.”

  “I know that, Clare.”

  His eyes were so blue it was almost like staring up into a cloudless sky. Clare found herself getting lost in his gaze.

  He grinned. “But maybe I have something to prove to myself. I mean, hey—what kind of self-respecting geek chickens out from an actual paranormal experience? I’d have to turn in my Ghostbusters proton pack and my Green Lantern ring. Plus they’d bar me from the San Diego Comic-Con for life.”

  Clare grinned back. “I love it when you talk nerdy to me.”

  “Ooh,” he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “when all this is over, remind me to read you poetry in Elvish.”

  “Elvis wrote poems?”

  “Can we shelve the canoodling till a later date, guys?” Al suddenly appeared beside them, effectively putting a stop to the nerd-flirting. “I have limited reserve nerve for this mission and I’d rather not have a complete mental breakdown before we achieve our objective.”

  Maggie finished double-bolting her office door and joined Clare, Al, and Milo in the middle of the room. They had decided that, before heading out to the middle of Cambridgeshire to find the Bartlow Hills tumuli, they would first test whether
Connal’s spirit could indeed be transferred into Milo’s consciousness. Since they wouldn’t be able to get into the tomb without Connal’s help, they had to find out first if the magic worked.

  Clare pocketed Comorra’s raven brooch and nervously picked up the silver cuff from the table. She held it out to Milo, who reached out a hand.

  “Wait!” Clare said. “For luck …”

  She stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the lips. Before Milo could turn too bright a shade of pink he took a deep breath, plucked the silver cuff from Clare’s palm, and slipped it over his wrist. Maggie and the girls watched, horrified, as Milo’s eyes suddenly flew wide and he opened his mouth in a silent scream. The muscles of his neck stood out in sharp relief and veins in his temples began to bulge. His hands grabbed for the sides of his head and collapsed forward, landing hard on his knees as he went down on all fours.

  “Milo!” Clare shouted and dropped to the ground in front of him.

  “Dude …” He started murmuring like a chant, his body rocking back and forth. “Dude … dude … dude … chill …”

  “Milo?” Clare reached out but he flinched away from her.

  “Chill … seriously … I’m here … I …” He wrapped his long arms around his own shoulders, hugging himself as if to keep from flying apart. “I’m right here. Let me drive. Let me drive, man …” Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. “Dude … Connal. Chill out, man … this hurts …”

  Staggering to his feet, he backed into the corner of the office, his shoulders jamming up against the shelves, rattling the skull, and batted the glasses off his face. The girls and Maggie watched, spellbound, as Milo became … spellbound. His posture altered. So did the carriage of his head and his facial expression—all subtly, but distinctly. Clare could’ve sworn that, for the briefest instant, his blue eyes actually darkened to Connal’s almost-black brown.

  “Clarinet …” Her name rasped out from between Milo’s lips in a voice that was definitely not Milo’s.

  “Connal?”